Crime committed by migrants — including last week’s alleged subway mugging involving an 11-year-old Venezuelan boy — and general riots in New York City are “really getting out of hand,” ex-Gov. David Paterson said Sunday.
“You just hear these situations you’ve never heard of before,” the Democratic former gov said on 770 WABC’s “The Cats Roundtable” radio program. “Last Tuesday, there was an 11-year-old kid who mugged a woman on the 7 train.”
The small-fry suspect has been linked to a string of robberies in Central Park as well, police said.
“The first thing that [people] notice is that this is a migrant. … It’s the product of a bunch of people being sent here without the city having any time to adjust to it,” Paterson told host John Catsimatidis.
“It’s just not going to work. It’s too many people. Not every migrant is a criminal,” the ex-governor said. “But a sizable number of people are acting in this kind of anti-cultural fashion, and all it’s doing is alienating the [immigrant] citizens who live in the city who try to make the city as great as it is.”
The city has spent about $5.5 billion to shelter and care for the flood of migrants who have arrived here since 2022, The Post reported last week.
Paterson also separately noted a recent increase in crime in Central Park and the riotous protest outside a rally in Harlem for Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for the White House after President Biden stepped aside.
He particularly slammed protesters for vandalizing the Bird in Hand restaurant.
“This antisocial, totally riotous frame of mind seems to creep into our daily lives more and more. It’s really getting out of hand,” Paterson said.
Overall, crime may be down, with Paterson crediting Mayor Eric Adams and Police Commissioner Edward Caban with putting a dent in violent incidents.
But Paterson said episodic crimes involving migrants, out-of-control protests and incidents in typically safe spots such as Central Park “frighten everybody” — and law enforcement has to get on top of it.
“After a while, people start thinking about whether or not they want to live in a place where this happens … This is really becoming a topic that comes up when people are eating, when they’re talking to each other riding the subways,” he said.
“There is going to have to be a real change in policy or just deployment [of more cops] to try to nip this before it gets to where it got back in the mid-‘70s and then repeated itself in the early ‘90s.”
In a separate WABC interview, Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said New York has President Biden and VP Kamala Harris to blame for its migrant crisis.
Cruz credited Democratic former President Barack Obama with enforcing the law and deporting illegal border-crossers.
“On immigration, Obama, by and large, followed the law. He actually deported millions of people. … The left got very angry with Obama. They called him ‘the Deporter in Chief,’ ” Cruz said.
“What Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have done — and Harris was the border czar …that no other administration has ever done [is] they just defied the law. They just released illegal immigrants by the millions. It is utterly unprecedented,” he said.
“They want this result. … They want this invasion to continue and to get worse. New York City and every city in America is paying the price for the invasion.”
